


planets bend between us

by 8611



Series: Star Woofs [2]
Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fusion, F/M, IN SPACE!, M/M, Science Fiction, Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-03-17
Updated: 2013-03-17
Packaged: 2017-12-05 16:00:47
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 18,258
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/725153
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/8611/pseuds/8611
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Stiles is uneven and angry, Derek is lost, and Scott has a Bad Feeling about this. (Star Wars!AU.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	planets bend between us

**Author's Note:**

> This is a direct sequel to [you wardens of the sky](http://archiveofourown.org/works/570238), so I’d suggest starting with that.
> 
> It didn’t come up in the first fic, but Lydia isn’t human, she’s Kiffar, and that’s important for this fic.
> 
> Something that caused confusion in the first fic (understandably) is when the heck this ‘verse is set, time period-wise. In terms of physical time, it takes place somewhere like 175-ish ABY (I wanted to move it past the continuity snarl that is that the EU). However, I’m def borrowing a lot from the old Jedi Order, and slapping it on top of New Order stuff, so there are things taken from before even the prequel trilogy. Short answer: it’s a fusion timeline in terms of Jedi teaching/culture and general canon, but set way after the original trilogy in actual year. 
> 
> Finally, a MASSIVE thank you to the two people who were the absolute biggest help – [canistakahari](http://archiveofourown.org/users/canistakahari) for putting up with my incessant prodding and questions and was an amazing sounding board, and [spinningdust](http://spinningdust.tumblr.com/), who is beyond fantastic and agreed to beta this monster for me. <3

Scott doesn’t have any memories of home. It’s not as if he’d have any memories from some far-flung home world. He’s from Coruscant; he’s lived his whole life among canyons of buildings and pyramids of temples. Still, he doesn’t remember his home, the place he was born to. No memories of the mother and father he knows he has, or had, because he’s checked his own holocron. That’s allowed to them, once they make knight. Ostensibly it’s to ground yourself, to know that you have come from a place far away and yet have come to somewhere new, and become this person now, standing here, in the archives, with a holocron in your hand. 

The thing is, some people do have memories of home. Isaac remembers his mother and father, the wide grassy plains of his home planet, the twin moons that glowed softly at night. Stiles doesn’t remember a mother, but he’s sure he must have had a father, and he remembers snatches, basics, of Old Corellian. Derek remembers touching his forehead with rough fingertips on a planet of islands planted with rows of trees, vines, crops.

Scott’s like any other Jedi from Coruscant – found early, placed in the temple before anyone else. His earliest memories are of fellow younglings all from this same place, from the canyons and the pyramids.

“Do you ever miss Corellia?” Scott asks Stiles one day, and he can tell when the question throws him off, even though his face remains neutral. He sidesteps a bit too quickly, and there’s a sudden buzz around his form as he brings up his practice saber to block Scott’s stroke. The blades fizz together, and it’s strange seeing Stiles’ face like this, glowing blue, when he’s started to think of Stiles’ saber as red.

(This is nothing more than passing the time, basic practice, because Stiles is too rough and Scott is too skilled. Stiles never seems to come alive with a practice saber in his hands as much as he does when the cool handle of his new one comes to rest against his scars.)

“No,” Stiles says, frowns, and spins to catch Scott’s blade. This is something Stiles has always known – he’s always had trouble figuring out exactly who he was, and who he is, but he will always know where he is. Stiles is anchored to the ground that he walks on in a way few others are. There’s a reason he survived so long on Korriban.

“Sorry,” Scott says, “it was an odd question.”

“Don’t apologize,” Stiles says, and he means it, and they swirl around each other to the humming of the sabers.

\---

Derek is in the map room when Stiles keys open the door, and Stiles stills, watching Derek’s back. Derek’s body never telegraphs like his face does, and with his arms clasped loosely behind his back and his face turned away, he appears relaxed. Stiles knows better, however. He feels like he’s just walked into a den of angst.

Derek turns around, and when he sees Stiles a few emotions flicker across his face in quick succession. He must have been deep in some sort of strange headspace if he hadn’t felt Stiles – he knows he carries a signature in his blood now that no other person has in this temple, something that marks him as being strange, dark, not quite right.  

“I’ll leave-“ Stiles starts, but Derek shakes his head, so Stiles comes in instead, crossing across the holographic orbits, boundaries, shipping routes. Stiles recognizes the map section with a start – the blue planets and stars that are spinning through the semi-darkness of the room are of the Qiiura sector. Laura had shown him this map shortly after she’d taken him on as her padawan, pointing out Qiiura itself with one long, pale finger. Her nail had pierced the holograph, the tip of the finger at the core of her home world, and Stiles had stared, wide eyed.

“I know I shouldn’t be doing this,” Derek says, and his voice is clipped, short. Stiles sighs, crosses his arms. He never knows exactly how to respond to Derek, because, unlike Scott, he never knew him very well before. The only reason they’ve drifted together is because of Laura, and Derek is one of the things making Stiles feel unbalanced.

(He thought he’d been unbalanced, no rudder or keel, back on Korriban, but he’d belonged there, darkness curling through his bones, but here, in the Temple, he’s shaken and wrong.)

“I’m not exactly the one who should be telling you otherwise,” Stiles says. Derek looks at him out of the corner of his eye before he bats Qiiura to the side and the whole system zooms out, leaving parts of the neighboring systems to creep into the edges of the room.

“Core worlds,” Derek calls. “Corellian sector.”

Stiles licks his lips as blue lines and shapes zip past him, crossing his robes and skin, and he’s not sure what to do when he finds himself standing in the middle of the system he’d come from as a child.

“Doaba ol’val tru,” Stiles says, and the words sound heavy and foreign in his mouth, it’s been so long since he’s even thought in anything besides Basic. They come back to him easily enough though, easily accessed memories. His memories have always been too good, inhumanly so, and he remembers those words from the funeral of a mother he never knew, will always think of them as inherently Corellian.

He spreads his arms, palms wide, before bringing his hands together, and the map contracts so that they’re surrounded by the whole of the Core, the Colonies just beyond the edges of the map.

“You’re the second person to bring up Corellia today,” Stiles notes after a moment, and Derek turns to him, eyes hard. “I don’t have any ties to it.”

“You always will,” Derek says.

“That’s un-Jedi like of you to say.”

“No matter how hard we all try, we’re still going to have our home worlds somewhere in our blood.”

Stiles just shrugs, and they’re silent again for a moment before Stiles turns to go. With his hand hovering in front of the door he turns back to Derek for a heartbeat, lost among the Core worlds.

“Home worlds, huh?” he asks, and Derek just nods. “Outer Rim. Esstran sector. Horuset system.”

He leaves Derek in the swirls of a changing map, and just before the door closes he sees a small red planet with seven moons, rendered in blue lines and dots, come to rest by Derek’s shoulder.

\---

Isaac finds him in the workshops, fixing a loose plate on his saber hilt. He holds out a tablet silently, although one of his eyebrows is raised, which is a full out smirk for Isaac.

“Are we being sent somewhere horrible?” Scott asks with a grin, but when he takes the tablet and reads the message he can feel his jaw go slightly slack.

_I’m doing a run through your neck of the woods next week – feel like meeting a girl for lunch?_

It’s unmarked, and wherever it was sent from is jumbled and bounced so that it can’t be traced, but Scott knows exactly who the message is from.  

“Oh,” Scott says. “Um, that’s interesting.”

“Hilarious. The word you’re looking for is hilarious. You have a smuggler sweet on you.”

“I – she’s not a smuggler.”

“You should ask Stiles one day why he knows Old Corellian, which will explain why Allison knows it.”

Scott levels Isaac with a look for taking a sharp tongue with him, but he just leans against the table Scott is working at and gives him a clean, innocent little smile.

Still, after Isaac wanders off and the plate is fixed, Scott goes in search of Stiles. He’s curious now – it’s not like Stiles is some illegal, planet hoping heathen. The reasons behind someone knowing Old Corellian can’t be that bad. As far as he knows it’s a dead language, which would suggest the only people who know it are academics bored enough to try to learn it.

Stiles isn’t in his room, so Scott stops in the corridor, closing his eyes and trying to locate Stiles.

 _Stiles?_ Scott hasn’t been doing much of getting into Stiles’ head lately – they used to do it all the time as kids, get in trouble for ‘talking’ when they should have been listening – because there’s something dark and fractured under the surface, every time he opens a line between them.

 _Med labs with Lydia_. The answer is muted, like Stile is far away, or, more likely, shielding himself.

Stiles is sitting on a worktable in a lab with Lydia, both of them cross-legged with their knees nearly touching, clearly talking about something that requires great animation. Scott’s half afraid they’re going to shove the equipment around them off the table, but they’re amazingly still except for their arms and faces.

Scott has to stop for a moment just to stare at the two, something that for a long time he never thought he’d never see again - Stiles and Lydia in a half-argument, half-discussion, closer than most people would dare get, their faces intense. Still though, things have changed. Lydia’s hair is long again, braided down her back over her tight robes for working in the labs, and although Stiles’ hair is still shorn, he’s missing his braid and his robes are now dark, heavy fabric.

“Scott,” Stiles says, looking over Lydia’s shoulder, and he smiles as Scott walks over, an honest, open smile, and Scott can’t help but smile in return. He knows, realistically, that there’s something warped and broken in Stiles, but he also knows that Stiles at least has an anchor, the same one he’s had since he and Scott met as younglings.

“Hi guys,” he says, grinning at them. “I have a weird question.”

“For me or Stiles?” Lydia asks, and Scott supposes that they’re probably both used to weird questions.

“Stiles,” Scott says. “How do you know Old Corellian?”

“Why is everyone suddenly so worried about Corellia? You and Derek both asked me about it last week.”

“It’s uh – you remember Allison?”

“Not particularly?”

“Captain Argent; she was the one who took us out to Korriban.”

“I was mostly comatose for that ride. What, are you going to attempt to teach it to her? It’s not a romantic language, I’ll tell you now.”

“Romantic?” Lydia butts in, a smirk warming her downturned lips.

“No, nothing like that,” Scott sighs. “She already knows it, and I want to know why.”

“Oh. Smuggler. Or thief. Con artist. Possibly all three,” Stiles says.

“Why do _you_ know it?” Scott asks, raising his eyebrows.

“My father was a government agent on a task force formed to take out high profile smugglers. And people still use it at funerals.”

So, Isaac might not have been too far off the mark. Scott sighs, rubbing a hand over his face.

“So your new girlfriend is a smuggler,” Lydia says, tipping her head to the side so that her braid spills across her shoulder. She might be smiling, but she’s always been good at staying neutral.

Later, despite his better judgment, Scott still sends Allison a message back –

 _Lunch sounds great_.

His judgment has been wrong before. He’d be all right if it was wrong in this particular situation as well.

\---

Stiles has been back almost five months, and yet every time he heads to his sleeping quarters for the night it stills feels wrong. Someone had decided that, even though he was technically still a padawan (in files, at least, no one really seemed to think of him as anything in particular anymore – he’s not Genim, as he’d been to his instructors, or Knight Stilinski, which he’d be if none of this had ever happened, but just Stiles), he should be moved up to the knights’ quarters.

He’s not going to complain though. He spent eight years sleeping with ghosts whispering in his ears, and now he can sleep in utter and total silence, which is not something he’d get in a padawan dormitory.

It’s still odd, though. This was never his part of the Temple, and now it suddenly is. Lydia had evidently been behind the move to some degree, judging by the fact that her quarters were just down the hall from his own.

He’s curled up in the rough-spun blanket on his pallet when there’s a knock on his door. He looks up from where he’s reading a novel on his tablet, and is suddenly aware that Derek is standing outside his door, bleeding exhaustion and something that feels resigned.

“Yep,” he calls out, and when the door slides open Derek is standing in the hallway, looking slightly out of place, somehow, and very tired.

(He belongs here, in this corridor, in these rooms, in the Temple, more than Stiles probably ever will.)

“Can I come in?” Derek asks, and he’s stiff, his shoulders, his voice, his face. Stiles just nods, and Derek moves himself to the center of Stiles’ space, the door slipping shut behind him with a flick of his fingers.

“You can sit down,” Stiles says after a silent beat, and Derek ends up in the desk chair, curled in on himself. Stiles doesn’t prompt him to speak, and they stay quiet for so long that Stiles assumes Derek must have come by just to sit, so he goes back to his novel. It’s hard to concentrate on the words though; with Derek here the unbalanced feeling is a fresh wound, setting him on edge and off kilter.

“I don’t know how to do this,” Derek says after a while, and his voice startles Stiles. When he looks up Derek is looking straight at him, honest and open, and Stiles doesn’t think, just sets down his tablet and beckons Derek over with his thumb, the way other people would use their first finger, something that Laura had done any time she wanted to draw Stiles towards her, away from whatever had distracted him from training.

Derek stares at Stiles’ hand for a moment before he gets up, wooden and robotic, and crosses the room before sitting next to Stiles, back to the wall. He doesn’t move to come closer though, and he lets his head fall back, his eyes closing slowly.

“I don’t either,” Stiles says after he counts ten of his own heartbeats. He’s surprised at the way the words tumble out of his mouth, quiet and fierce. “I don’t know how to exist here anymore.”

“I had to go through her death twice,” Derek says.

Stiles only counts the once, counts the time when the shuttle plowed into the rocky, angry ground so hard that he nearly slammed his head into a wall so hard that it would have killed him. He only managed to not die in that moment because Laura reached a hand out for him and held him in space, concentration in every line on her face.  

He only counts the time when the crash triggered an explosion, only counts that time that Laura threw him from the wreckage, only counts the time that he had tried to reach for her, tried to find her, tried to scream her name.

Only counts the time that he pulled a husked up, burnt corpse from the destroyed shuttle days later, when the fire had stopped and the metal had cooled.

The time he dug a shallow grave with a piece of the twisted hull and had to leave his master there, in the ground of a haunted planet with no life, no soul.

(And yet, flowers grew.)

“She was all I had,” Derek says, and when Stiles reaches out for him, Derek scoots closer, into the cradle of Stiles’ arms, and shoulders, and chest.

“I know,” Stiles says, and not because he knows that she was all Derek had, but because she was all he had as well, bleached bones and purple blossoms on a world without a pulse.

Stiles clings to Derek, and Derek lets him, one hand wrapped around Stiles’ arm, and they stay like that for so many heartbeats that Stiles loses count.

\---

Scott’s starting to wonder if maybe a tracking chip is in order for Isaac.

(He’s also starting to understand how Laura felt, every time she’d come get him, looking exasperated and muttering about _let’s go, Stiles is missing again_.)

At least this time he finds Isaac in the Temple, which is an improvement. He heads to one of the hanger bays to see if anyone has checked out a speeder, and instead finds Isaac and Danny together. They’re crouched on the wing of a Delta-7, up to their elbows in a rather singed astromech droid, who’s squeaking in annoyance.

“Sorry,” Isaac says without looking over his shoulder when Scott heads over to them. “I know I missed diplo class – but Master, I didn’t want -“

“Excuses,” Scott points out, and Isaac swivels around to give him a sheepish grin before turning back to Danny.

“Ok, on three,” Danny says, hooking his fingers into a slot on one of the droid’s legs. “One, two, three -“

The astromech comes loose from its housing with a screeching wrench that’s half metal and half panicked, frantic beeping. Scott can see where it had been fused to the wing surface thanks to a laser blast. Considering the droid’s still fully capable of freaking out, though, Scott’s willing to bet the damage is mostly cosmetic.

Isaac jumps down to take the droid from Danny, lowering it to the ground. It goes shooting off towards the mech shop in the corner of the hanger, one wheel clacking loudly and erratically.

“It was hurt,” Isaac says, squaring his shoulders.

“Isaac did happen to come in the minute the knight brought the fighter back in,” Danny says, ruffling Isaac’s hair with an easy smile.

“Don’t tell me you want to be a fighter pilot,” Scott says. He’d actually wanted to do that very thing as a youngling – Danny and he had drawn starfighters all over their notes on their tablets when they were supposed to be paying attention in lectures. Somehow, though Scott had found he was better suited for a blade and close combat, and Danny had gone on to co-lead the primary fighter squadron at the Temple.

“No,” Isaac says. “I don’t really like flying. I just like the astromechs.”

“You and everyone else.” Scott will admit that he has a giant soft spot for them. “You want to make up your lesson now or later?”

“Now would probably be the correct answer,” Isaac says, and offers up a toothy smile. Scott just sighs, but he’s grinning, and he waves to Danny as they head out.

Isaac actually listens attentively (despite his amazingly ability to get distracted by droids – _healing_ droids though, and that counts for something – he really is a good student) and Scott lets him go right before the padawans have dinner call in their refectory. Scott smiles as he watches him catch up with Boyd and Erica, Erica’s face lighting up in her lethal grin when she sees Isaac, and he thinks for a moment of Stiles, Lydia and he. They’re all the same age by Temple reckoning, and so they’d all been in the same year and done practically everything together. Despite Stiles’ iron-clad crush on Lydia and Lydia’s vague disdain in his direction, they’d still all stuck together. No one had batted an eyelash when they’d all ended up with Hale masters, because they’d been so close as younglings.

(And now this, dead and dust, dead and burnt, and alive but made of sharp bones and haunted eyes.)

He can sense Stiles when he passes into the knights’ personal area, behind a door to one of the private training gyms. They’re much smaller than the main gyms, but Stiles will only spar in the main gyms with a practice saber and a toned down version of the new way his body moves, aware of prying eyes and curious onlookers.

Scott’s not actually sure what he gets up to behind closed door with Morrell, actually. She’s the only other Juyo user in the Temple, and Stiles had gravitated towards her as soon as he was back, red saber and dark robes.

He’s not sure what makes him do it, exactly, but when he reaches up and knocks on the door it only takes a moment before it slides open and he’s confronted with Stiles and Morrell stripped down to their base layers, sweating and pulled apart only long enough for Scott to come in and close the door.

“Mind the sabers,” Morrell says to him with a nod of her head before she launches herself at Stiles, and Scott has always been amazed by Juyo for this exact reason – there’s nothing economic about it. There’s no minimization of movement, no conservation of energy. It’s built on nothing but raw power and over coming your opponent as fast as possible.

Scott sits on one of the weight benches that has been shoved into a corner, just off the practice mats, and watches as Stiles blocks Morrell’s whole body, the yellow and red of their sabers making their skin glow orange. Even though they’re sweating and breathing heavily, incredible force behind each movement, they both look deadly calm, and even when Morrell catches the edge of Stiles’ arm all he lets his face show is a moment of a grimace before it’s gone, wiped clean.

Stiles is more angular in his movements than Morrell, and they work well together, trading blows and swipes that fit together in just the right way so that neither of them could serious hurt the other. Morrell has the upper hand simply because she’s more skilled, more years behind her movements, but she’s fighting on equal ground with Stiles. It takes a lot of trust to spar with someone with real sabers.

Stiles has to drop to a knee under one of Morrell’s blows, and Scott watches as he twists across the mats to come up swinging, vaulting off the balls of his feet in the same way she had done when they’d restarted. There’s less acrobatics, Scott realizes – they’re fighting at ground level, anchored on steady feet.

It’s only when Stiles breaks and shows a moment of annoyance that Morrell goes totally still, kills her blade and stops, backs up a step from Stiles. He growls in frustration, and Scott has to suck in a breath when he feels a wall of something _wrong_ hit him, coming from Stiles. It’s anger, that’s not new - Stiles has been angry no shortage of times - but this is dark, broken anger, and there’s something under it that feels like death and decay.

“What happened?” Morrell asks, and she seems to be asking less out of concern and more in a sort of teaching moment.

“Concentration slipped,” Stiles says, and he cracks his wrist before killing his own saber, tossing it into his non-dominant hand. “I don’t even know, I just –“

He huffs out a breath from his nose, presses his lips together.

“Just?” Morrell prompts after a moment.

“Just thought about stone,” Stiles says. “I told myself, stable as stone, and then… I won’t be using that thought pattern anymore.”

“Wise choice,” Morrell says. “Want to call it a day? I think we’ve probably gone into dinner.”

“Yeah,” Stiles says, and mirrors Morrell’s early movement, taking a step back and pulling his feet together. He offers a small bow, and Morrell returns it.

“Nice to see you, Scott,” she says as she walks out, smiling at him, and he’s left with Stiles looking incredibly tired and worn out.

“How long have you been sparring?” Scott asks, raising an eyebrow as Stiles slumps down next to him. With his arms exposed Scott can see scars that he doesn’t remember Stiles ever having, as well as the glancing burn that Morrell had left.

“Hours, not sure,” Stiles sighs. “I was totally in the zone until I disastered my way out of that fight.”

Scott isn’t sure what to say to that – it’s ok, your whole adult life has been a disaster, it’s getting better? It sounds angry and harsh to his own mind, and so he keeps his mouth shut. The only sound in the room is their breathing, Stiles’ rapid and his own quiet and deep, although eventually Stiles comes down.

“Derek came to me a couple of nights ago,” Stiles says finally. “I wasn’t sure if it was… ok? to tell you.”

“Why?”

“I’m not sure,” Stiles says. “And because he was pretty destroyed, so I wasn’t sure if he wanted me talking about it.”

“You two probably have a, well, connection. I guess.”

“Something like that.”

Stiles doesn’t offer up any more information, and they eventually get up to leave.

“Hey, man,” Stiles says, looking over at Scott as he’s locking the door. “Thanks.”

“For what?” Scott asks, grinning.

“Just existing, basically. Letting yourself exist around me.”

“I couldn’t do anything else,” Scott says, and the honest, ragged look of relief on Stiles’ face makes Scott gather him up in a hug. “I never would.”

“Thanks,” Stiles says again, and when they pull apart there’s something in his eyes that maybe looks a bit more whole.

\---

Stiles wouldn’t call them nightmares, per se, but he tends to wake up with ghosts and skeletons in his head. He’d be more surprised if he wasn’t having weird dreams, honestly.

Still, last night had been better. He’d spend the evening with Scott, and it had given him a feeling of serenity that he hasn’t felt in a very long time. He gets close when he’s sparing with Morrell, maybe because she radiates nothing but collected calm and control when she fights, but it’s not quite there. He’s still too frayed.

Scott has helped though. He’s been spending a lot of time with Isaac, understandably, but that one evening together had done wonders. He sighs, sitting up in bed and scrubbing at his face with rough palms. Just in case his scarred hand wasn’t rough enough, he’s getting his saber callouses back on his other, as well. Morrell has been trying to train him out of a dominant hand, although he’s not sure how well he’s been doing at it. That’s Scott’s area, being able to use either hand like he’s been ambidextrous since birth.

He forces himself up and out of bed and dresses, slipping into the same dark layers he’s been wearing for years now. He’s not sure who’s behind it (Lydia, probably), but when he’d first ended up in this room the drawers had been full of robes not too unlike the ones he’d been wearing on Korriban. He knows they should feel wrong, but instead they just feel like home. He’s certainly not the only one in the temple who wears dark robes – there are no shortage of Jedi who do for personal or cultural reasons – but he is the only one who wears clothes that are technically _Sith_ robes. Incredibly outdated, but still.

When he heads to the refectory he finds it alive with early risers (which is pretty much the whole of the order of knights, the Temple breeds certain habits into you), including the end of one of the tables packed with just about a whole fighter squadron. Technically the pilots have their own living space, but the squad that Danny and Jackson are in charge of are knights, not just pilots.

“Hey Darth Mopey,” Jackson calls when Stiles walks past, and Stiles sighs, rolling his eyes.

“Shut up, Jackson,” Danny says pleasantly, and Stiles turns in time to see him force shove a spoon into Jackson’s face, poking him repeatedly in the nose while Jackson tries to grab it. Stiles smirks, flicks a wrist, and the spoon goes flying, heading down the back of Jackson’s robes.

Stiles didn’t have time for Jackson even when he wasn’t bordering on evil.

Lydia has saved him a spot, and when he sits down she shoves a plate of bread and fruit at him with a raised eyebrow, the motion pulling at her tattoos.

“Eat,” she tells him. “I know you skipped dinner last night.”

“I didn’t, Scott and I got second call,” he assures her, but he still does tear into the food.

“Jackson’s going to come after you one day,” Lydia points out.

“He can’t, he’ll get kicked out.”

Lydia just levels him with one of her unnervingly powerful stares, and Stiles shifts under her gaze. She’d spent years as Jackson’s anchor, and everyone assumed that one day they’d ask to get married and it would be one of the rare ones that the council would grant.

When they’d crumpled and split, Stiles and Scott seemed to be the only two who weren’t shocked. Still, Lydia has a line into Jackson’s messed up head better than most people, even to this day.

(Stiles has been wondering a lot these past few months, what he’s missed in the long years, what’s happened with the people who used to be his friends.)

“Derek came down while I was doing an autopsy yesterday,” Lydia says, and although she sounds like she’s starting a normal conversation, Stiles isn’t fooled. Lydia’s version of an autopsy is reading the corpse, and it always leads to a host of unpleasant outcomes. Stiles had barged in on her, mid panic attack, when he’d first gotten back, and when she’d looked at him from where she was standing at the head of a body, hands cupping the side of the head and her forehead pressed to the corresponding cold skin on the corpse, he’d frozen.

(There are spirits in the broken temple, and they tear and pick at him as he walks the hallways, laughing, taunting, calling out, _little boy, what do you know? How do you know? You’re no more Jedi than you are god, broken, dead master, empty eyes_.)

“Someone died?” Stiles says, deliberately misleading the conversation. He know it won’t work, but this isn’t something he wants to talk about.

“A team brought a body back from one of the agri colonies, a passed-up padawan corps member,” Lydia says, “That’s not the point, though, and you know it.”

“Fine. What did Derek want?”

Lydia reaches into her robes (and Stiles doesn’t know where she keeps these things; she wears the tight robes of any of the medical or science staff even when she’s not in the labs) and produces a small metal canister. Stiles knows what it is the minute he reaches to take it, drawing his hand back like he’s been burnt.

(And he has, fingers curling reflexively.)

“Absolutely not,” Stiles says. “No, not now, not ever. Why the fuck would he even do that? Why are _you_ doing this?”

Lydia pulls the canister back, tucks it away before looking up at him.

“I’m sorry,” she says, after a beat. “I thought you’d want it.”

“He should have put in the pyre with the rest of her bones.” Stiles know it’s stupid even as the words are out of his mouth, has read enough to know that keeping bones from loved ones is common practice on Derek’s home world.

“He said he couldn’t save anyone else,” Lydia says. “I couldn’t get anything anyway, not from Laura. I mostly brought this up to ask, very seriously, if you need to talk to someone.”

Oh. _Oh_. Lydia had read Korriban on the bone, not Laura, and now she might be the only person in the Temple with just a fraction of an idea of what he’d been through.

“Did you ever dream about Peter?” Stiles asks, and when he turns to stare at Lydia there’s something stormy in her eyes.

“Until recently,” Lydia says, and she stands up. “You’re not alone, Stiles.”

He watches her walk away, past Danny and Jackson and the pilots laughing about something, and half of him agrees with her while the other half tells him what the ghosts had.

\---

Allison meets him at a coffee shop not far from the Temple, low to ground level and in a residential area. She’s curled up in a large chair at the back, chatting with the server, and Scott smiles without meaning to. It’s been four months since he’s seen Allison, but evidently he’s still connected to her in some way.

She’s wearing her hair undone, long down her back, and she waves at him across the shop when she spots him.

“Can I get you anything?” The server asks as he sits down, and he looks at Allison in question – aside from coffee, he has no idea what’s on the menu.

“Tea,” Allison tells the man. “Something herbal.”

“Thanks,” Scott says, grinning and feeling like a little kid again.

“I figured you guys must have tea, even with the no-fun policy.”

“The no-fun policy was actually never reinstated after the reformation,” Scott deadpans, and Allison laughs, her head tipped back, a mug held in her hands, and just like that Scott feels like he belongs, down here on the ground with a smuggler.

“Oh, so fun is ok now?”

“In small doses. Too much leads to the dark side.”

Allison has a beautiful smile, he decides, when one curls across her lips.

“What are you guys allowed to do now? I know the guy who restarted everything was _definitely_ getting it on.”

“Supposedly,” Scott says, and he hooks air quotes around it, “we’re allowed to take any path that fits us, as long as it leads to inner peace.”

“How’re you doing with that?”

“Miserably. Ask any Jedi if they’ve found inner peace and they’ll just give you a speech about _still walking the path_.”

“The path must be insanely long.”

“Something like that,” Scott says, because the truth is, he’s never been much of a good Jedi. A decent warrior, but he’s not particularly monkish and he’s incredibly aware of it. His outbursts used to get him in trouble with Derek (ironically) and then Deaton.

When his tea arrives Scott sips it slowly, watching Allison, the curve of her jaw, the cut of her jacket, the jut of her legs, stretched out under the table.

“How’s Stiles?” Allison asks after a bit, and the question throws Scott more than he’d like to admit. Allison frowns at him. “Is that not his name? Damn, I’m usually pretty good with names-“

“It’s Stiles,” Scott says. “Well, Genim. But Stiles.”

“Ah, Genim. That’s an old name – his parents must have been traditionalists. Or they just wanted to embarrass him. Either way, how is he?”

“He’s…” _broken, angry, ungrounded and walking a new path that will never meet up with the one he was on when I knew him, originally_ , “I’m not sure. I used to be able to figure out how he was feeling by how much he was talking, and how much he was projecting, but he hides his emotions now. I think he’s only talking to make us think he’s ok.”

Allison sighs and reaches out to tangle her fingers with his, where he’s got a hand on the tabletop.

“There are some things you don’t come back from,” she says, quiet and strained, and Scott knows in that moment that there’s something big and empty in Allison’s past that he doesn’t know about. Probably never will know about.

“I know,” Scott says. “I just hope… he can find some balance. It’s just hard, because I can’t feel a lot from him anymore, and when I look at him all I see is pictures in holocrons from before the reformation, before the wars, even.”

He hasn’t said that out loud to anyone. Allison gets up and comes around the table, sinking down on to the plush chair next to him, and they’re pressed together from hip to knee, hands entwined in his lap.

“Having you must help,” Allison says. “I saw the way he gravitated to you on the ship, heading back in.”

“I seriously hope so.”

“He’ll always have the scars, but he’ll heal some ways.”

Allison presses a kiss to his temple and he sighs, leaning his head against hers. The shop is mostly empty, and the servers don’t seem to be in much of a hurry, so they let them stay there for a long time, until the tea and coffee have gone cold and Scott really should get back.

“If _I_ miss lessons Isaac will never let me hear the end of it,” Scott sighs. “Especially since it’s you.”

“Oh?” Allison asks, raising her eyebrows.

“He thinks you’re a smuggler and so we have some sort of star-crossed love.”

“Hate to burst his bubble, but I got out of that business years ago.”

“Wait, you were actually a smuggler?”

“Well, yeah, I thought you’d figured that out when you saw me reading a book in Olys Corellisi. Family business.” The way she says _olys corellisi_ is heavy and curling, and the sounds remind him of Stiles, in the rare instances when he’d say something in a language that Scott now knows his father had taught him.

“Huh. Stiles and Isaac were right. Partially, I guess.”

“Yeah, things went… badly. Want me to walk you back?”

“I think I might know the neighborhood,” Scott says, but what he really wants is to just stay with Allison, reach out and touch her, trace the line of her shoulder and the length of her neck.

“Shocker, that,” Allison says, grinning. “I’ll let you get back.”

Scott’s somewhat surprised when Allison turns her head to press a kiss to the corner of his mouth, but the surprise quickly ebbs into something else entirely, and he turns his head, catches her lips.

It’s a simple little thing, lips on lips, but when they pull apart and rest their foreheads together Allison lets out a pleased little sigh, and something warm and perfect twists in Scott’s chest.

\---

The readout on the wall says that Stiles has the gym for sixteen more minutes when someone overrides the door and comes in.

Stiles is about halfway through one of the kata Morrell has taught him to practice with, and he frowns, his control smashed in an instant. Annoyance flares at the edges of his vision, and he’s half sure it’s Jackson come to bother him, the person catching him off guard before he can figure out who they are.

Instead, when he turns, a palm raised and ready to shove Jackson away, Derek is standing a few feet from him. Stiles watches as his eyes flick down to the bladed staff he’s been training with and then back up to Stiles’ face, although his expression remains neutral.

“It’s weighted similarly to a saber,” Stiles explains, tossing it to Derek. He catches it automatically, and then spins it, over his palm and the back of his hand. Somehow, Stiles can feel his annoyance vanishing, and he tries not to dwell on it.

“Where’d you find this?” Derek asks, taking it in his other hand and dropping into what Stiles recognizes as the smooth, iaido version of the opening stance of Djem So. It’s not common; Derek is only the third generation, his master and her master before that working it out together before Derek. It’s incredibly tight and controlled, something that Stiles isn’t used to associating with Derek.

“They’re from the temple on Korriban, Morrell brought back a few.”

Derek looks up at him sharply, and Stiles watches as his hand tightens on the staff.

“Is that smart?”

“What, practicing with something similar to the weapon I used for eight years? No, that’s incredibly dumb and makes no sense, why would I ever do that?” At the flare of anger in Derek’s eyes Stiles sighs, rubbing a hand through his hair. “I used a glaive for the whole time. This bridges the gap between that and my new saber. If you’re worried about it having an influence over me, don’t.”

Stiles retreats to the corner where he’s stashed the bundle of weapons Morrell had brought back and fishes out the other war staff, pointing at Derek with it.

“I’ve got 14 minutes left,” he says, and Derek shifts back into his opening stance before Stiles twists backwards and spins the staff into his other hand, striking at Derek without cutting his speed or strength, counting on Derek to catch the strike. It might be an unfamiliar weapon, but they’re all trained in bladed weaponry to some extent as padawans, and Derek has the upper hand on him in terms of strength by quite a bit.

Derek brings the staff up, hands spread on the grip, and Stiles’ blade slams into it with an angry squeal of metal on metal before Stiles spins away again. He gives Derek a second to shift his stance and then strikes again and again, forcing Derek back further and further. Stiles knows he’s letting his annoyance get the upper hand, but the fact remains that Stiles has power in his anger that he usually doesn’t touch, because it skews way too close to dark, swirling pits that he could pitch into at any moment.

The staff feels more at home in his hands than his saber; he’s still not used to fighting with one again, and the red is still causing some sort of cognitive dissonance. His saber was always green. Even when he was a youngling he’d call one of the green ones because green was the color of _home_. He remembers photos – his mother’s wedding dress was the same deep green that ran down the stripe in his father’s uniform pants, had been woven into Corellia and her history for ages upon eons.

(Stiles somehow knows, deep in his gut, that he’ll never go back to a green saber.)

Derek refuses to go on the offense, and Stiles has to fight down growing irritation. He can be calm, he has to be. If he managed it a few times on Korriban, he can deal with it here, in the Temple. At home.

He pulls himself back into a simple ready stance, almost awkward with the double blade on the staff, but he wants to see what Derek will do. Derek takes a deep breath and transfers his staff back to his other hand, but he doesn’t make a move.

“I’m not going to break if you attack me,” Stiles says, keeping his voice level, even though at the back of his head all he can see is red blood, smoking skin, and something is telling him to _attack_.

( _No_. It’s an easy word, he can do this.)

“I’m not worried about you breaking,” Derek says. “Not like that, anyway.”

“Try me,” Stiles says, raises his eyebrows, and Derek finally advances on him, but it’s slow and more than easy for Stiles to catch the strike before parrying back at Derek. “Derek, _come on_.”

“You’re getting angry.”

“Welcome to my world. I’m always angry. _Come on!_ ” Stiles finally does force shove Derek then, making him stumble back a few steps, not prepared for it.

Derek snarls, puts a bit more speed into what he’s doing and then _finally_ slams the staffs hard enough to make Stiles’ hands vibrate when he blocks the blow.

Amazingly, it’s calming. Stiles takes in a deep breath through his nose and gives back, pushing and pulling and getting into Derek’s space, and with each strike, each clang of blade meeting metal, he finds himself more and more grounded.

There’s something else though, snaking and swirling in his mind, and he knows that it’s coming from seeing Derek fight, transferring his staff between hands like it’s the most simple of movements (Scott’s insane double wielding skill comes from somewhere, after all), and Stiles holds his own, Derek’s controlled and direct style a good match for Stiles’ more wild, improvised one. He watches the movement of Derek’s arms, the set of his shoulders, the way his hair is matted to his forehead with sweat, and he’s pleased to find that Derek isn’t angry either, just determined.

Stiles is pretty sure that the pounding of his heartbeat isn’t just from the speed that they’re moving at.

He ends up on one bent knee, staff braced above his head with Derek’s blade scraping along the grip, when his calm finally fractures. However, it’s not in the usual way, the way that will make Morrell step back and shut down, but rather in a way that makes him tumble backwards, hands flat on the mats for a moment, staff under his palms, before he’s springing up, tossing the staff away, and stalking back to a confused looking Derek.

Derek’s quick on the uptake though, and he has to sense what’s coming off of Stiles in waves, different from his usually jittery, dark energy, because right before he gets into Derek’s space Derek throws his own staff, leaving it blade down through one of the mats, and catches Stiles with his hands around his face before their lips crash together.

Something in Stiles snaps, not a break, but something like a whip in his mind, and he splays his palms over Derek’s hips, over the rough cloth there, and kisses Derek like it’s the only thing he knows how to do right now. He’s not even sure why, he should be annoyed with Derek for so many reasons, but instead all he can think about is Derek coming to him one night and how he wants to get his hands, lips, breath, all over Derek’s skin.

Derek’s lips slip open, and Stiles takes the invitation, and Derek is warm and perfect and Stiles breathes him in, anchors himself against and through Derek. For once, maybe for the first time since they found him, Stiles’ head is quiet, calm. All he can think about, all he can want, is Derek, and Stiles slips a hand under the shoulder of his tunic, marvel at the warmth of Derek’s skin under his hand. Derek makes a sound that can only be called a _rumble_ , and he pulls their bodies flush together, bites at Stiles’ bottom lip.

Distantly, Stiles is aware that there is a chime, a calm voice, _notice, you have one minute left on your allotted time_.

Derek pulls himself back, breathing heavy and tunic pushed nearly off one of his shoulders, and Stiles raises his hand to thumb at his (swollen) lips, almost absently.

“Boyd will be wondering where I am. He has combat training,” Derek says, squaring his shoulders and straightening out his clothes.

“Of course,” Stiles says, and he wonders if Derek and he will ever be able to exist anywhere but in this strange in-between space they have, snapping between trying to force their bodies into one space and acting oddly formal around each other, still in some sort of hackneyed knight and underling relationship.

Stiles watches Derek go, a calming buzz under his skin, and then spends the last thirty seconds on the clock collecting the war staffs and bundling them up with the rest of the weapons. He scuffs at the hole punched through the mat with his toe, where Derek had left his staff embedded in the ground, and he can’t help the smirk that sneaks across his face, or the heat in his stomach.

\---

Scott is, evidently, a romantic. He would have scoffed at the thought, but now he’s in the main archive, trying to track down a holocron on Old Corellian to try to figure out how to say a few basic things for the next time he sees Allison. He could ask Stiles, but he wants to do this himself, and if nothing else he can go to Stiles prepared with the basic knowledge and then have him straighten out the pronunciation.

“Scott?”

When Scott looks up from the terminal he’s searching through he finds Deaton bent over him slightly, a quiet, benign smile on his lips. Scott knows that look – as a padawan it meant that Deaton had an especially challenging assignment for him. Scott had thought at first that Deaton was amused that he was giving Scott something so hard to do, but by the time he’d passed his Trials he knew it actually meant that Deaton was happy that Scott had the wherewithal to take on more difficult tasks than his stage in training would suggest.

He straightens up, and Deaton reaches out to scroll through Scott’s search, the glow of the screen reflecting on his hand and sleeve softly.

“The languages are upstairs,” Deaton says. “Planning on chasing down smugglers?”

“Just the one,” Scott says, and he can feel a bit of heat on his cheeks. Deaton raises an eyebrow, but doesn’t comment.

“I might have to put a small dent in your plans. Have you heard about the agri corps member who was killed on Taanab?”

“Lydia mentioned it. I was under the impression that it was just someone who had gotten their hands on a lightsaber.”

“We hope, but there’s something slightly… off about the body’s signature. Dr. Martin said it felt like a trace version of something she’s felt from dark Jedi.”

“So you need someone to go to Taanab and figure out what’s up.”

Deaton just smiles at him with a slight incline of his head, and Scott reaches across the screen to exit the search. It looks like his linguistic wooing will have to wait for another day.

“You, Isaac, and Stiles are booked on a light class freighter heading to the Inner Rim leaving tomorrow morning.”

“Stiles?” Scott’s not quiet expecting the way his voice jumps, and he instantly feels guilty. It’s not that he doesn’t want Stiles around, but Stiles’ is uneven and rough still, understandably, and he sparks something red and angry half the time. Even when he’s outwardly calm, Scott can still sense something fragmented and hot at the back of his mind. Scott’s not sure taking him off world, away from the Temple, is the greatest idea.

“Right now, as much as the council refuses to acknowledge it, we have a very powerful weapon when it comes to dark Jedi. Stiles may be able to act as a kind of… detector.”

“You want to turn Stiles into an dark side detector, basically.”

“In time, there’s a chance that Stiles could make a very good Shadow.”

That surprises Scott – Stiles had shared what the council had told him when he first returned, which seemed to basically amount to ‘heal, but be prepared to become part of the Service Corps.’ To be a Shadow, Stiles would have to be a knight first, which seemed to be something that wasn’t on the table for him anymore.

“We’ll take Stiles,” Scott says after a moment, staring back down at the screen and dragging his fingertips down the glowing surface. “I’m not going to use him as little more than a tool, though.”

“I wasn’t suggesting it,” Deaton says, and then takes his leave, leaving Scott in the mostly quiet archives, the only sound the swishing of the librarians’ robes and a few giggling younglings in one corner.

 _Stiles, are you around?_ He assumes Stiles must be, he hasn’t actually set foot outside the Temple since coming back to Coruscant.

Instead of an answer in words Scott gets one in pictures instead, and images of the map room fill his mind, tangled with a signature he’s known to be Stiles as long as they’ve been friends – bright energy and a storm coiled under control. There’s still the dark anger around the periphery, but there’s much less of it than Scott has been feeling from Stiles these past few months.

Scott opens the map room door to find Stiles hovering cross-legged a few inches off the ground, although he doesn’t have a map queued up, and the lights are off. Instead, the room is lit by the late afternoon glow slicing in through the wide windows, making the edges of Stiles’ body stand in out a stark, orange relief against the calm blues and greys of the room.

“What’s up?” Stiles asks, cracking open one eye when the door closes behind Scott. Amazingly, there’s almost no anger coming off of Stiles, not even irritation, and instead he’s just calm and… pleased.

“What happened?” Scott asks, and walks over to crouch in front of Stiles.

“What makes you think something happened?” Stiles asks, opening the other eye and blinking at Scott. His eyes are amber in the dying sunlight.

“You’re happy.”

“It’s a bit pathetic that me happy is a cause for worry at this point.”

“I’m curious, not worried.”

“Derek kissed me. Or rather, I kissed him. And it was really kind of more him devouring my face than kissing me.”

“I’m sorry, _Derek_ kissed you?”

“It’s weird, I know.”

Scott sits down on the ground, resting his head in one palm and sighing. Now he feels even more like moving Stiles would be a bad idea. Evidently he’s found an anchor in Derek, which, as strange as that is, still makes a bit of sense. Morrell’s too fluid to be a good mooring, but Derek is rock solid. Scott’s always gotten a feeling of wet earth and wide open sky from Derek, something incredibly grounded, despite what’s gone on in his past.

“I’m happy for you,” Scott says, and he honestly means it. Stiles cracks a grin and drops to the ground, landing with a soft thump, and Scott puts his hands on Stiles’ knees, almost out of (old) habit. They would sit like this as kids, Stiles completing the loop with hands on Scott’s shoulders, and play games in their head. Their favorite was a far-ranging, epic strategy game where they’d try to change the outcome of the Clone Wars, or the Yuuzhan Vong War. As they got older it got less explosion packed and mythical creature ridden, and by the time Stiles had left with Laura for the Outer Rim it had turned into more of a meditation on the fact that even with everything, even with the foresight that comes from being past an event, some things were still impossible to change.

“I’m not sure if it’s really a thing,” Stiles says, and then raises his arms, settling his palms over Scott’s shoulders, and it’s amazing how easy it is to slip back into this, and in one moment Scott realizes what’s been wrong. He’s been treating Stiles like something to be fixed for months, not like a _friend_ , and it makes him frown. He tugs at Stiles with the force and Stiles leans towards him with a smile, their foreheads pressed together.

“I’m sorry,” Scott breathes, and Stiles squeezes at his shoulders.

“This is all kind of new territory. And I don’t mean the Derek thing.”

“I know,” Scott says with a huff of a laugh.

They stay pressed together like that for a long moment, heartbeats and minutes, and both of them are quiet, inside and out, just existing together in a way that they haven’t in over eight years. Scott clings to it, re-memorizing the feeling, and he knows Stiles is probably doing the same thing.

 _I actually came to tell you that we’re being sent out_ , Scott thinks after a while, the words fluid between them.

_The Council is going to let me out?_

_I think they want to use you as a dark side detector_.

A hint of laughter snakes across their bond.

_Awesome, glad I can be of use. Where are we off to?_

_Taanab, it’s an agri planet in the Inner Rim. Leaving tomorrow morning._

_I know it, believe it or not. Laura liked maps, I had to memorize all of the AgriCorps worlds when I was like 15._

They fall silent again, and when they finally pull apart the sun has set, leaving the room almost dark, the only light coming from the ambient glow of the buildings. They help each other up, and before they leave Stiles reaches up to his forehead, first three fingers touching his skin for a moment before pulling away. Scott smiles, returns the gesture, and the true happiness coming from Stiles is something he missed so much that he wants to tangle it in his hands and never let go.

\---

“You’re not coming with us, right?” Stiles asks as they’re setting the mats right after sparring that night.

“No, Scott’s the babysitter this time,” Morrell answers, grinning as she bends to pick up the staffs.

“I know you weren’t babysitting them,” Stiles says. He’s fully aware that Morrell was sent to Korriban to assess and remove a threat. It just turned out that she assessed him and found him to not be enough of a threat to kill him. She’s a Shadow, not a random knight who hangs around the Temple waiting for missions to go deal with various interplanetary squabbles.

“That doesn’t bother you,” she notes as they head out. They’ve missed first call for dinner (again), so they head for Stiles’ quarters to drop off the weapons.

“No,” Stiles says, shrugs. “Why would it? You kill dark Jedi or Sith, you don’t bring them back to the Temple to coddle them.”

“Well, I’m glad I didn’t have to kill you. It’s been ages since someone has wanted to learn form VII.”

“Glad I could distract you from your boring life of intrigue and assassination missions.”

Morrell has a razor sharp grin, and there’s something comforting about it. She’s calm and quiet, but she also wears her lethality on her sleeve, and Stiles is glad for that.

“Do you think it’s really safe for me to go off planet?” Stiles asks as he keys in his door code, sneaking a glance at Morrell over his shoulder.

“Why not? You’ve been doing well, especially today.”

In the span of 24 hours Stiles has climbed Derek like a tree and at least started fixing his friendship with Scott, plus the excellent sparring session he’d just had with Morrell. It’s probably the best day he’s had in years, if he’s being totally honest.

“I know, I’m just… I’m a liability. Especially to Isaac.”

“Ah,” Morrell says, and she leans against Stiles’ desk, crossing her arms. “So it isn’t your safety you’re worried about, it’s Isaac’s.”

“Yeah, of course. When do I ever worry about my own safety?”

“You should try it some time. You’re not a danger to Isaac.”

“He’s incredibly young and impressionable, and I’m kind of,” Stiles fishes around for the words, but they’re hard to find, nothing but a swirl and stream of colors and broken images. “I’m not as locked down as much as I should be.”

“You’re not projecting, or the Council really would have you in a holding cell. Who was my master?”

Stiles blinks in confusion, unsure of the direction of the topic change.

“Deaton.”

“Who else was his padawan at the same time?”

 _Oh_. “Laura.”

“You’re not the first person to bleed dark in these halls, Stiles. Deaton still thought it would be alright to take us both on, and Laura turned out to be fine.”

“Yeah, but you’re not evil.”

“And neither are you. Don’t act like you’re fallen, Stiles. You’re not. You’re in the sky, but you’re not in the space between the planets. You can ground yourself.”

Stiles looks away from Morrell, staring at a random point at the wall. He trusts Morrell most on this subject, because she certainly speaks from a place that’s allowed her to be deadly, allowed her to survive Juyo, allowed her to exist in a balance between the two sides of the force. Still, he knows the ghosts and spirits in his mind, and he knows what it’s like to be surrounded by the dead, armed with a red blade made of rough metal.

“Stiles.” Stiles looks up at Morrell, and she has a level gaze on him, strong and concrete. “What are you feeling?”

He knows it’s useless to lie to her.

“Trapped,” he says finally, and his voice is rough. “Trapped because of anger that doesn’t feel like it’s mine.”

“A planet can’t have emotions, or transfer them.”

“It’s not Korriban itself, it’s the ghosts.”

“You’re not with them anymore. That’s your anger, so use it.” Stiles looks back at Morrell, confused. “You have power in your anger, I know you know that. You’re using it as a cage, use it as a guiding star.”

“I can’t – I’ll –“

“What, fall? Go dark? You won’t. You know yourself too well to do that.”

“I _don’t_.”

“Yes you do,” Morrell says, and she pushes away from the desk. “Who are you?”

Stiles had failed at answering this question ten years prior. He thinks of Scott and Derek, and Lydia, circles back around to Morrell, and feels anger flare at the back of his mind, anger at himself, but it’s woven up with something else – heat from Derek, warmth from Scott, fire from Lydia.

“Stiles,” he says finally. “That’s what matters.”

Morrell smiles, and reaches behind her into the bundle of weapons she’d set on the desk, coming back out with Stiles’ saber. It’s been his long enough that the leather wrapped around the handle is starting to darken where his palm and fingers sit. He’s thought about reinforcing the handle with an actual building material, but he can’t bring himself to change anything.

She holds it out, base towards him, and Stiles counts to five, wraps himself in the heat, and the warmth, and the flame, and the calm he’s learned from Morrell, and then crosses the small room to take the hilt. Morrell closes her hands over his, over the saber, and looks up at him.

“Can I change my answer from earlier? In part, anyway,” Stiles says. Morrell raises an eyebrow at him. “Laura, and Derek. Scott, and Lydia, and you. And me. I’m all of us.”

“You’re never alone, Stiles,” Morrell says, “and always remember your _own_ emotions. You can’t be calm, unless you know anger first.”

When Stiles ignites his saber, holding it upwards between them, for the first time the red feels warm, reminds him of home, instead of a violent planet, and blood, and Peter, and in his head _green_ slides to _red._

\---

The shuttle ride to the spaceport is uneventful, and Isaac spends the whole time asleep, cheek pressed up against a window.

“Your padawan appears to be comatose,” Danny notes after he puts the shuttle down on the landing pad and turns back to them.

“I’m jealous,” Stiles mutters, unhooking his seat harness. “I can’t fall asleep on command _anywhere_ , let alone on a shuttle.”

“It’s my smooth driving,” Danny says, and Scott laughs, shaking his head. He puts a hand on Isaac’s shoulder, watching as Isaac’s eyes flutter open, eyebrows drawn together.

“That was a fast twenty minutes,” he rasps, voice thick with sleep. It’s still early, and Isaac had only been awake in the time it took him to get out of bed and then onto the shuttle.

Danny walks them into the main building, scrolling through the departures board to match it up against the ship code he was given.

“You guys lucked out, you’re on a new-ish YT with a captain we’ve used before,” Danny notes. “ _Hunter’s Bow_ , bay 14.”

Scott nearly trips.

“Sorry?”

“We’re heading to bay 14,” Danny repeats, leading the way.

“He wasn’t questioning that,” Isaac says, and he’s evidently awake enough to smirk, although he withers a bit under Scott’s gaze.

“I know the captain,” Scott explains. “Actually, we all do. She took us out to Korriban.”

“Ah, gotcha,” Danny says, and out of the corner of his eye Scott can see Stiles look at him.

 _I know I was oscillating between panic attacks and emotional shut-downs on the way back, but I would have remembered you pining after the captain of this ship, and yet you totally are. Who is she?_ Stiles sounds amused – he’s been light all morning, and Scott’s glad for it.

 _Allison Argent, I told you, and I wasn’t_ pining _because I was too busy making sure you didn’t vibrate out of your skin and go into shock._ Although Stiles had left Korriban no problem, on the way back he’d gone through what Scott could only describe as withdrawal – it wasn’t a fun journey for anyone.

_Fair point. I was going to ask you a few days ago – Argent?_

_The YT didn’t tip you off?_

_Contrary to popular belief, other people use YTs. They’re not even manufactured on Corellia anymore, they outsourced them to some Inner Rim planet._

Bay 14 is fairly small, and even though the _Bow_ isn’t huge, it still takes up most of the space. Danny leaves them as Allison is ducking down the ramp, a grin on her face.

“You planned this,” Scott says, walking towards her, and he ignores the want to reach out and touch her.

“Just a bit,” Allison says, grins. “I really am heading that way, though. I’ve got a hold full of seed packs.”

Isaac heads for the mess when they board, although Stiles hovers for a moment in the main passage, looking towards the front of the ship.

“You’re welcome to come up to the cockpit,” Allison says, motioning them along, and Scott finds himself installed in one of the seats behind Allison and Stiles. Stiles, who is practically beaming with that stormy, bright energy that it’s been so long since he’s had. Sometimes Scott forgets that while Stiles doesn’t feel any need to be a pilot, he still adores flying.

“You really don’t mind us up here?” Scott asks as he straps in, but Allison shakes her head, waves it away.

“It’s totally fine. It gets lonely up here anyway. GCS ground, this is YT-1760 882945HBW, requesting clearance for departure.”

“Standby, YT-HBW, heavy ground traffic,” says a tinny voice from a speaker somewhere in the instrumental panel, and Allison huffs out a little sigh.

“Someone important must be coming in. We’re probably here for ten-ish minutes,” Allison says, twisting around in her seat to look at them. “Also, it occurs to me that we haven’t been formally introduced, I’m Allison Argent.”

“Scott told me – I’m Stiles,” Stiles says, taking her outstretched hand to shake. “Where are you from?”

“Coronet, nothing special. What about you?”

“Tyrena.” Scott has never heard Stiles answer that question with anything besides Corellia or Coruscant, and it occurs to him that he didn’t even know where exactly on Corellia Stiles was from until this moment. “Although I don’t remember much.”

“That sucks they take you guys so early,” Allison says. “How do you get to know your family?”

“You don’t. I remember my dad though, and pictures of my mother.”

Allison nods at that, and then turns back to the panel when the tinny voice comes back, telling them they’re cleared for departure.

Scott watches Stiles as they take off, the open look on his face, something almost childish. He’s content, and Scott feels the need to do everything he can to keep Stiles that way.

 _I didn’t see this for eight years_ , Stiles says, and turns to Scott, his face unguarded. Scott doesn’t respond with words, just sends pictures of takeoffs and landings, the stars, spinning through empty space with the streak of stars past the windows, and Stiles leans back, closes his eyes, and the soft smile on his face is beautiful.

Allison puts them in orbit, and out one section of window Scott can see the only place he’s ever known as home, the circles and spokes of lights on the surface still visible in the half-dark as the sun rises over the planet. When she’s got clearance and her line right, they jump, and that stream of stars from Scott’s mind is streaking past the ship.

“Doaba,” Stiles says, and Allison looks back at him. _Peaceful_ , Stiles provides.

“Always, I love this,” she says, nodding her head. She pats the panel with a grin before standing up, stretching. “Alright, _Bow’s_ got this for the next fifteen hours, so shall we go see what your charge is up to?”

Scott walks with Allison to the mess, and stops her outside the door so that he can snag a lose strand of her hair around his finger. Right now, everything is even, and balanced, and Scott lives for moments like these.

“I’ve figured out one thing in Old Corellian,” Scott says. “I was planning on doing this huge language project to woo you, but then this got in the way.”

“ _Woo_ me?” Allison asks, laughing. “I don’t even know the whole language. No one does. A ton of it is lost, don’t worry about it.”

Scott can’t be around Allison’s smile for this long without doing something, so he winds a hand around the side of her neck, and she leans in, her hands on his hips. It’s much like the kiss from the coffee shop, at least until their lips open against each other, under each other, and then it turns into something decidedly less innocent and containing a lot more heat.  

“So,” Allison says, when they pull apart, and her lips are red, drawing Scott’s eyes. “What’d you learn?”

“Ol’val,” Scott tries out, trying to mimic the way he’s heard Allison and Stiles use the heavy vowels.

“Ol’val,” Allison repeats with a small little smile, and Scott’s pleased to hear he got it right. “It’s a good word to start with.”

 _Hello_.

\---

Taanab has a startlingly large amount of grass.

Aside from the small capital that they’d landed in, the few farm fields, and the lazy rivers that Stiles has seen so far, the only other thing here is grass. Tall, silvery stuff that waves slowly and softly in the light breeze. Isaac had started sneezing pretty much the minute they were landing gear down.

They’d been trucked out to an outpost on the equator to talk to one of the board members of the agri business responsible for the contract on the planet, and that had left Stiles alone in the main admin building, haunting the halls while Scott and Isaac talked to the man. The residents of the planet were all stiff and formal – Stiles isn’t used to or even deserving of the honorific Master Jedi, and yet they keep using it when they talk to him – but this man, Harris, he’d introduced himself as, was formal in a different way. Something about him crawls across Stiles’ skin and settles at the top of his spine like a ball of dark sparks, wary and worrying.

(Peter, it feels like Peter, the way he’d felt after he’d fallen, before Lydia had driven a shard of glass from the labs through the side of his head, every bit of the force behind it. Even though she hadn’t touched the broken edges, the amount of power she had used had still opened up angry, red lines on her palms as if she had.)

Stiles wanders to the observation tower in one corner of the building, riding the lift to the small circular room at the top. It has floor to ceiling glass all the way around, and to the south there are farms and to the north pastoral land. Stiles watches a herd of shaggy, hooved creatures amble through the quiet sway of the grass, the sunlight warm on their backs.

The lift door opens and Stiles turns to see Isaac standing framed in the space, hands tucked into his sleeves in an imitation of what he probably thinks he’s supposed to be doing. Padawans don’t wear cloaks around the Temple, and Stiles remembers them all tripping over them and trying to figure out the sleeves on their first few off world missions. He’d had especially bad trouble, perpetually too short for his age (until he’d suddenly shot up at 16, taller than Scott, almost of height with Derek).

“Lost?” Stiles asks as Isaac comes to stand next to him.

“Scott knew I was getting bored, he told me to come find you,” Isaac says. “I though my brain was going to bubble out through my ears.”

“Part of the job,” Stiles says.

“Only _part_ ,” Isaac huffs out, and Stiles is struck by the fact that he sounds amazingly like Scott at that age. Scott had zero time for diplo lectures and more than enough time for saber training when they were younger. Stiles guesses he missed the part where Scott became a good negotiator somewhere in the time that he was fighting off ghosts.

“Still,” Stiles says. He stays quiet, still not sure exactly how to deal with Isaac. Under his teenage annoyance and distaste all Stiles can feel from him is a tired, quiet kid. What tiny snatches of solid emotion that Stiles can catch from him are all directly related to his boredom, or a vague amusement at the animals out on the pasture. He’s very… basal. Stiles is used to himself, and Lydia and her myriad of scars that she keeps hidden behind a sharp tongue and dangerously bland smile, or Derek and his volumes of issues. Even Scott, easily the calmest and most level of all of them, still feels like a little ball packed tight of repressed emotions when you get below his surface.

Isaac though, there’s nothing like that there. He’s honest, open, young. This is why Stiles was worried – it’s easier to avoid other people’s issues when you’ve got a myriad of your own problems. And Stiles has enough issues to fill the archives.

“May I ask a question?” Stiles looks away from the meadow and over at Isaac, who’s fidgeting ever so slightly, looking at his feet.

“I’m not your master. You don’t have to wait until I ask you a question,” Stiles says.

“Yeah, but you’re still a knight.”

Stiles frowns, crosses his arms.

“Who told you that?” He asks finally.

“No one, I just assumed that – are you not?”

“I’m still a padawan in the records,” Stiles answers, and Isaac looks up at him, eyes wide.

“But, my friends and I thought – and you live in the knights quarters, and – really?”

“I wasn’t even close to the Trials the last time I had formal training of any kind. I was only 18.”

“Scott took them at 24.”

“Scott’s a precocious genius who happened to grow up pretty quickly. That happens when you get involved with the Hales.”

(Lydia hadn’t even had to pass the Trials. The Council had decided that killing Peter was trial enough, when the time came.)

“I would have though, uh,” Isaac trails off, looks away for a moment.

“Getting stuck on a barren, haunted rock for eight years would have done it?”

“Yeah.”

“If it had been a couple months, probably.” Stiles shrugs. “It’s not a big deal. Based on my time on Korriban I’m actually pretty suited to the ExplorCorps, they just don’t recruit every year. I’ll probably go next year.”

Stiles has actually been trying to not think about that too much. His father had made the ultimate sacrifice – giving up a member of his family – so that Stiles could be a knight, a master, not someone chasing ancient bits of pottery on far-flung planets. He could have just gone to university for that, after growing up with his real family on his home world. Still, he’s not going to leave the Order, he can’t do that, can’t even fathom that, and in the grand scheme of wash-outs the ExplorCorps are looked at pretty highly. It’s not argi on a corporately owned planet or spending your life killing yourself in an asteroid mine.

“That sucks,” Isaac sighs. “That _seriously_ sucks.”

“Life never goes where you want it to,” Stiles says, and realizes after a moment that he’s just said the first half of something Laura used to tell him so often that it became something of a prayer for them.

(“Life never goes where you want it to,” she tells him, and they’re losing shields, burning up in atmo.

“But you can always walk new paths,” Stiles had said over her grave, trying to flex the burnt skin on his hand, from where his saber had fractured and exploded as he tried to cut through the burning hull to get to Laura.)

“Yeah, but you can fight to go where you want,” Isaac says, suddenly fierce, and Stiles grins, lopsided and twisted, his mind still on Laura, and Korriban.

“Don’t forget that,” Stiles tells him, and Isaac gives him a pointed look, one that Stiles knows means something similar.

_Stiles? Did Isaac make it to you?_

_Yeah. How’d it go?_

_I don’t know, honestly. Harris is… there’s something off about him, like Lydia said._

_Off how?_

_Not sure yet. I’ve got a bad feeling about this whole thing._

\---

“There are main archives back in the capital,” Scott says, sending the map to Allison. The shuttle driver wasn’t around when they got back to the ship, so Scott had taken advantage of it and opened a comm channel to Allison, back on the _Bow_ in the capital.

“You’re thinking there might be information about what’s going on somewhere in them?” Allison asks, face slightly distorted by the bad connection.  

“There will be financial records. Boring, but pretty revealing. We can come back and help, Stiles can fly this thing, I think.”

“Stiles could probably fly a tin can.”

“Flying skill isn’t genetic.”

“You say that, but…” Allison is grinning. “Alright, I’ll head to the archives, don’t worry about heading back in. I can get a lot of work done in the couple of hours it would take you guys to get here. I’ll search to see if arrivals match departures, if they’re missing staff numbers, stuff like that. Do you guys know how many corps members you have here?”

“I don’t, but if you contact the Chapter House they’ll help you.”

“We trust them?”

“We’re going to have to. You can claim that you’re working for an offworld farmer, looking for laborers.”

“Will do. I’ll keep a channel open to my personal comlink so you can contact me.”

“You’re amazing, Allison, thank you so much.”

“I know,” Allison says, smirking before she kills the connection. Scott leans over the instrument panel, hands braced on the smooth metal, staring at nothing in particular. He’s not totally sure that economic records are going to reveal much, but it’s worth a try.

He stares up through the front window, looking out at the rolling pastures. Isaac and Stiles are standing together, Isaac talking, Stiles’ arms crossed. He closes his eyes, takes a deep breath, and lets his mind roam. First it’s just all Isaac and Stiles, a mosaic of sparking energy and calm anger, but then he pushes past it all, flying across the grassy meadows, the farms, curling around the space they’re in.

Harris is still inside, but instead of what Scott had felt from him before, he’s spiking fury, and there’s something dark and churning about it. Far away, on the edge of Scott’s senses, two sharp signatures are racing towards them. Two people in a speeder, probably. As they get close enough he can tell they’re force users, which isn’t particularly out of the ordinary on a Jedi Corps planet, but there’s something off about them.

When they’re close enough that he can identify their signatures as something dark and twisted, Harris suddenly floods into his mind, and Scott is all at once aware that he’s not some lackey from an agri corporation. He heads for the door of the shuttle, racing around the seats, and as he jumps out the door he sees Stiles square up, face the main building, a hand going to his saber.

 _Stiles_.

_Way ahead of you. That Harris?_

_I think so. Can you feel the other two?_

_Yeah, a couple klicks northwest._

Scott runs to them, the grass pulling at his feet and cloak, words out of his mouth the minute he reaches Stiles and Isaac.

“Isaac, I need you to lock yourself in the shuttle and establish communication with Allison. Radio for any of our ships in the nearest orbit or hyperspace lane. If you can’t find anyone, open a channel with the Temple. Also, I need your saber.” Isaac nods, shoulders stiff, and hands over his lightsaber before sprinting for the shuttle.

“Harris doesn’t know what he’s doing,” Stiles says, muted, and Scott looks at him out of the corner of his eye as Stiles unhooks his saber from his belt.

“How so?”

“He’s using it all like a plaything. Whoever trained him thinks that you can play the dark side like a game.”

Scott trusts every word. He can feel the two people moving closer and closer to them, and when the speeder comes skating around the corner of the observation tower, the grass long enough to run along the smooth bottom, they both vault out, landing with sabers in hand. They’re young, younger than he and Stiles, and they both look pleased to have something to do, sinister twists to their faces. The girl is a Zeltron, the boy is human, or at least looks it.

“Harris is moving,” Stiles says.

“Let’s deal with these two first.”

The girl looks slightly afraid when Scott ignites both blades, launching herself towards him. He can actually feel the punch of fear from the boy when he sees Stiles fire up his saber out of the corner of his eye. It must be strange, Scott realizes, to see someone you assume is a Jedi with a red blade.  

Scott doesn’t need two blades for this - although the two have had training past what they would have had as younglings, they’re still rough and too angry to be truly skilled. The girl comes up against him in a wave of fury, blade cracking and popping against his own. Her arms shake, all of her power in her upper body, and he forces her back, again and again, sweat beading on her brow.

Out of the corner of his eye he’s aware of Stiles cleanly slicing the hilt of the boy’s saber in two and then slamming him in the head with an elbow, his body crumpling into the grass like a stone. Scott forces the girl back one more step and then shoves her down to the ground, head first. Her blade goes silent and dark when her fingers slip off the hilt, her red hair spilled like blood around her head in the grass.

“Harris?” Stiles asks.

“Yeah,” Scott says, and leads the way towards the main building. The lobby is quiet, empty of the guards and admin staff from earlier, and the building is almost silent. He can feel Harris, though, and he’s moving towards them, through the hallways.

They find him in an atrium with a view of the farm fields, looking much the same as Scott had seen him a few hours ago, although there’s a saber on his belt now.

“Ah, you’re back,” Harris notes lightly. “I would have left, were I you.”

“Who are you?” Scott asks, and Harris smiles at him almost sadly, as if he thinks Scott is stupid.

“You have a bad memory. We’ve already been introduced.”

“I’m fairly sure it was more of a ‘who are you working for’?” Stiles says, and Scott had forgotten how sarcastic he had a tendency to get in the face of danger. “It was implied.”

“Why does it matter? You won’t make it out of here alive,” Harris says.

“Try us,” Scott says, and drops back into a ready stance, igniting his blades.

“That’s a mistake, Master Jedi,” Harris says. “You don’t know anything about the dark side and what power it brings me.”

“Actually,” Stiles says, and his blade hums to life at his side, “we might.”

Confusion flickers across Harris’ face, ever so briefly, at the sight of Stiles’ blade. He still reaches for his own lightsaber, pointing it at the two of them as he switches it on. Scott drops the world away, drawing his focus to three lone constellation points – his own body, Stiles, and Harris – and then starts moving, feeling the air around him, the energy of the sabers, of Stiles, and he moves with it all. Stiles ghosts around him, coming at Harris from his back, and he has to catch Stiles’ strike before immediately moving to Scott, a blur as Scott brings both of his blades around.

He remembers, once, a fight on a small Mid Rim planet where they’d been called together, Derek and Laura, and Scott and Stiles. Scott and Stiles had been separated from their masters, and found themselves surrounded by mercenaries, all armed to the teeth and hulking, massive beings. They’d been all of 16, Scott is fairly sure, and as they had stood back to back in that moment, the blue and green glow of their blades tangling together between them, they’d made some sort of silent, enduring pact.

( _We’re going to make it. We’re going to walk away from this. We’re going to be better than them. We’re going to work together, we’re going to fix this and survive_.)

Scott thinks of that now, as he and Stiles move in perfect tandem, even though they haven’t really been training together these last few months, and they’d been apart for years. They slide back together perfectly, and work at gaining more and more ground from Harris. Scott can feel that he’s been trained by something larger than any of them, something sinister and more than just a fallen Jedi, and he’s skilled with a blade. Still, they’re gaining the upper hand, slowly, but together.

Harris spins around, kicking at Stiles and blocking Scott’s strikes, and then throws a hand out at the wall of windows, shattering the glass with one wave of the force. A million shatter points appear in the glass, raining shards down, and Harris leaps through it, towards the rolling grass and hard ground two floors below them.

Without a single word exchanged he and Stiles go after him, in free fall together for a moment before the ground is below their feet again, and they’re up, blades crackling together where Harris meets them. There’s fury in Harris’ movements, quick swings of his shoulders and arms, a strange half mirror of Stiles’ forward driving, unrelenting movements.

The difference, Scott realizes, is that Stiles doesn’t feel angry, violent, like Harris does. The coiled energy, like the world before a storm, that Scott has always associated with Stiles has become something else, tranquility and fury kept close around him, heartbeat even and face calm. His energy comes together with Scott’s where they cross paths, spin around each other, always aware of the other without having to try at it, blades humming past each other.

Something changes, just barely, Scott sees a weak point in the wrath Harris has wrapped around him, and he goes for it, Stiles coming with him. Scott slams both blades down in an _x_ over Harris’ head, forces him to catch the upward strike, and in the space of a breath Stiles is behind him, force slamming him in the small of his back with a knee, and sending him crumpling to his knees, Stiles blade at one side of his neck and Scott’s at the other.

“Game over,” Stiles says. “You shouldn’t have been playing in the first place.”

“You think I’m it? There will always be more of me,” Harris says, something sharp and raw in his eyes.

“I always knew it was never just you,” Scott says, and then flips his free saber around, slamming the hilt into Harris’ head and knocking him out.

They’re left in the waving grass with the sound of the breeze, their breathing, and the hum of their sabers.

\---

When they get to the shuttle they find the _Bow_ next to it, and Allison runs towards Scott, slamming into him and wrapping him up in a hug. Isaac peeks out after her, and trots down the ramp when he sees it’s Scott and Stiles.

“Fuck, I thought you guys were dead with the way Isaac was going on about needing to be here _right now_ ,” Allison says into Scott’s shoulder, and Stiles just shakes his head at the two of them, smiling softly.

“We’re good,” Scott says. “Everyone’s fine.”

“Except for the wannabe Sith lord tied up in one of the holding cells with a head wound,” Stiles says.

“The Sith are dead,” Allison says, drawing back from Scott, looking confused.

“They never totally are, seemingly,” Scott sighs. “Although, whatever Harris is, it’s not that.”

“He’s just dark,” Stiles says. What he’d felt from Harris was the dark side, certainly, but it wasn’t what he’d experienced on Korriban, something barely controlled, a jet of twisted energy running through everything. Harris was treating it like something to be toyed with, that he could pull on as he liked. He was uneven, and more of a danger to himself than others, ultimately.

Stiles closes his eyes, takes in a deep breath, and categorizes everything – grass, dirt, something musky from the animals grazing a bit away. Open sky, and yet, above it all, things he’s much more used to, things he can ground himself on – jet fuel, afterburn, the grit and grime on the _Bow_ that speaks of the Core, and home.

It’s so easy to do this, even after what he’d just done. He’d thought that fighting Harris would have set him back, opened up old wounds, worked away at his mind, but instead, all he feels is calm. There’s still something angry and dark at the back of his head, but he assumes that will always be there. The point is that he can run his fingers along the hull of the _Bow_ above his head and know what it means to be here, now, knows what it means to be Stiles.

There’s something else though, and Stiles walks out from under the shade of the _Bow_ , looks up into the sky, shades his eyes from the soft light that filters through the atmo, and sees three dots slicing through the sky. He can feel them before he can hear them, and as they get closer the other three come out to join him.

“That could be bad news,” Allison says, hand going for the blaster strapped to her thigh.

“No,” Stiles says, because there’s something wrapped up in the ships that reminds him of flame, warmth.

“It’s the cavalry,” Scott says. “You got a call out, Isaac?”

“Yeah, there was a ship already heading our way.”

The ships get close enough that Stiles can feel the ground rumbling under his feet, can hear the roar hanging behind them as they outpace their own sound. One is a sleek blockade runner that he doesn’t know, but the two flanking it he recognizes as Jedi fighters, painted in the red and silver livery of the elite squadron from the Temple.

As the ships deploy their landing gear Stiles is able to read the call signs painted on the fighters, and he grins when he realizes what they say – Planetshine and Brezak.

“It’s Danny and Jackson,” Stiles calls over the roar, and they head to meet the main ship as it comes a rest in the grass, the stalks flattened in the wake of its engines.

Lydia is the first out, Erica and her master (Stiles can place his face but not his name, just remembers him as the grumpy man in charge of their lessons in the Halls of Healing) following her.

“I see you brought your tumor,” Stiles says to Lydia, nodding in the direction of Jackson’s fighter. “I hear you can get those surgically removed now.”

“Hush,” Lydia says, although there’s a smile in her eyes. “I heard you idiots were in over your heads.”

“We did ok,” Stiles says. “How’d you guys get here so fast?”

“We were already heading this way. Some moron forgot to give me the personal effects of the boy who was killed, and neglected to mention that one of those items was a _lightsaber_. It read dark Jedi all over the place, so we were sent after you.”

“That’s a bit of a massive slip up,” Stiles says.

“Huge. It’s being dealt with.”

“Yeah, we’ll see if anyone ever gets disciplined for that.”

Lydia gives him a pointed little look, but she stands on her toes to kiss his cheek before moving off towards Allison and Scott. Boyd comes down after her, nodding at Stiles as he heads past, and then Stiles is faced with Morrell and Derek, both of them neutral and blank.

“I hear you have someone for me,” Morrell says, breaking the silence first.

“Yeah,” Stiles says, “want me to show you?”

“Please,” Morrell says, and Stiles chances a glance back at Derek as they head for the main building. Because Stiles had left in a bit of a hurry, his conversation with Derek the night before they’d left had been rushed and truncated, and not much had been solved by it. Stiles isn’t sure what that means, but it’s not like they can just pretend that none of this happened. It’ll have to get talked about.

Eventually.

Harris is still unconscious, hanging limp in the soft blue glow of an energy field in one of the cells when they get to him.

“The other two?” Morrell asks.

“The boy is in the next cell. We couldn’t find the girl.”

Morrell nods, and stares at Harris for a moment before turning to Stiles.

“What are you feeling?” She asks.

“Calm,” Stiles says, and it’s the honest answer.

“I’m glad,” Morrell says, offers Stiles a smile, and then turns back to Harris. Stiles leaves her be, and he’s most of the way back to the main entrance hall when he smacks head on into Derek around a corner.

“Crap – sorry –“ Stiles takes a step back as Derek catches him with a hand around his wrist. They stand like that for a moment before Derek lets go of Stiles wrist, clearing his throat.

“I, uh,” Derek says, and then clasps his hands behind his back, staring at Stiles. “Are you all right?”

“Totally fine,” Stiles says.

“You have glass in your hair.”

“I – what? Oh, yeah.” Stiles bends over, brushing the last of the atrium windows out of his hair, grinning when he stand back up. “Harris did some redecorating.”

Derek grinds out a little grunt, some sort of acknowledgement. They’re silent for a few more moments before Stiles decides that the conversation needs a redirect, and he’s not sure if Derek is going to be the one to move it away from awkward, obvious observations.

“You kissed me,” Stiles says, and holds up a finger when Derek opens his mouth to interject. “And it was totally cool.”

“It was?” Derek asks, and he sounds honestly shocked. “I thought you were going to say something about being emotionally compromised and how we can’t do this and –“

“No, that’s stupid.”

“I agree,” Derek says, and there’s heat in his eyes again, and Stiles does the only thing that makes sense – slams Derek into the wall with the force and then crowds into his personal space, kissing Derek with no small amount of gusto. Derek growls against his lips, his hands curling around Stiles’ hips, clenching his fingers into the material of Stiles’ robe, pulling him in even closer.

Stiles gets a knee between Derek’s legs, and Derek rocks against him with a strangled moan, a sound that Stiles swallows up, breathes in. The air between them is hot, sparking with something, and all Stiles wants in the world right now is to always remember the slide of his lips against Derek’s, the feeling of Derek grinding against him. Stiles draws back for breath and before he can lean forward again Derek presses a fierce kiss to his forehead, pressing his thumb into the curve of Stiles’ jaw, and Stiles takes his hand, kisses down around his wrist, up to his thumb, and then links their fingers.

When they do come back together it’s to press their foreheads together, and their breathing is rough but even in the space between them.

\---

Allison has a dozen tiny metal and glass birds hung from the ceiling of her cabin, made of copper and bronze, and soft blue and bright jade colored glass.

Scott watches a few of them turn slowly, lazily, and lets his fingers trail through Allison’s hair, undone from her braid and spread out across her shoulders and the pillow.

“Why do you think no one ever double checked the finance records?” Allison says, and Scott turns towards her, tracks the curve of her neck and shoulder with his eyes. “I mean, like five corps members just vanished from the roster of supplies. No one thought that was weird?”

“The agri planets aren’t the best run,” Scott sighs. “People go missing, and no one does much besides turn a blind eye.”

“That’s kind of shitty.”

“Yeah, it needs to be changed.”

(Scott’s already preparing a lengthy and somewhat scathing report for the council in his head.)

“Sorry,” Allison says, and she closes her eyes, shakes her head at herself. “That’s probably the worst pillow talk in the history of the universe.”

“It can’t be the _absolute_ worst,” Scott says, tugs on a strand of her hair, and Allison laughs, rolls up onto her elbows, and Scott runs his fingers down her side, resting his hand at her hip.

“Here, I’ll make it worse: what’s, uh, Morrell?” At Scott’s nod, she continues. “What’s Morrell going to do with them?”

“I’m not sure,” Scott says. “I mean, she’ll try to get them to talk.”

“And if not, she’ll kill them.”

“Probably. Then Lydia can get answers. ” Scott looks up at her. “Still not the worst, so far nothing about disembowelment or anyone’s mother has come up.”

Allison laughs at that, dips her head to kiss him, and splays a palm across his skin, across a scar on his side where he’d been bitten by some sort of canine off planet as a padawan, and he pulls her down, presses their bodies together. Allison shudders out a fluttering breath when Scott thumbs at her nipples, and she arches her back, skin on skin.

This is, of course, when Scott’s comlink decides to go off.

“McCall, where the hell are you?” It’s Lydia.

Allison groans, dropping her head to Scott’s chest, and Scott just sighs, reaching out for the comlink.

“Indisposed. This better be important.”

“Oh, sorry.” Lydia doesn’t sound sorry at all. “There’s food in the mess, I suggest you two come get some.”

“Thanks Lydia,” Allison calls, turning her head so that she can roll her eyes at the comlink. “Very much appreciated.”

“I’m impressed by your sarcasm,” Lydia says, and then clicks off her end.

“Should we get food?” Scott asks, and Allison picks her head up, resting her chin on Scott’s chest.

“Oh, sure, what the heck. Although, we’re continuing where we left off later.”

“Absolutely,” Scott says, grinning down at her.

They throw on as just enough clothes to be deemed decent (although Scott is going to spend all of dinner staring at all the skin that Allison’s tank top shows off) and head out to the mess, where way too many people are crammed into a room that’s designed for an absolute maximum of five crew members. Plates of some kind of meat and grain mash are being passed around, and judging from Allison’s surprised look it’s nothing from her stores, so it must have been liberated from the outpost that they’re still parked outside of.

Stiles is sandwiched between Morrell and Derek, and for three people he’s used to seeing smirking or not smiling, all of them are grinning and laughing, and Scott can’t help his smile in response. Isaac, Erica and Boyd are all clustered around Erica’s master (Leo? Len? Something like that – the perpetually pissed off master who gave classes on healing), who appears to be telling a very serious story, all of the padawan’s eyes wide, Isaac’s jaw even slightly unhinged, and Lydia is holding court with Danny and Jackson.

Allison drags two boxes out of a storage compartment and upends them across the table from Derek, Morrell and Stiles, so that they can be used as stools.

“You two look like you’ve been enjoying the evening,” Morrell notes, voice dry as desert. Scott coughs, heat in his cheeks, and Allison just grins, reaching across the table to steal plates and food.

“Lydia made sure we didn’t enjoy it too much,” Scott mutters, and Allison nudges him under the table with her knee.

“No one broke into the booze store?” Allison asks instead, depositing a plate in front of Scott.

“There’s booze?” Isaac asks, leaning around Leo.

“You’re _14_ , kid,” Leo says, and hauls Isaac back into his story telling by the neck of his tunic.

“Let’s not introduce alcohol into this equation,” Derek sighs. “There are too many people here as it is.”

“You’re looking a bit sour there, Der,” Stiles says, grinning.

“Master Hale, Stiles,” Derek says, prim and edged, although his eyes are warm. Stiles just elbows him and reaches for more food.

“Deaton wants to make you a knight,” Morrell says conversationally, and Stiles bites down on his fork so hard that Scott winces at the clack of his teeth.

“Excuse me?” Stiles asks, turning towards Morrell and looking slightly startled. “Since when?”

“He brought it up with me about a month ago.”

“And you didn’t think to tell Stiles?” Derek growls.

“Down, boy,” Scott says, and earns a glare from Derek for his troubles.

“The council will never agree to that,” Stiles says. “Half of them want me to disappear.”

“Hopefully this’ll change a few of their minds,” Morrell says, still sounding neutral, as if discussing the weather.

“I am in no way cut out to be a knight.”

Scott says, “Yes you are” at the same time that Derek says, “Don’t be an idiot” and Stiles just drops his head down onto the tabletop. He feels incredibly overwhelmed, judging from the emotion rolling off of him, and Derek places a hand over his back, between his shoulder blades.

“I’ve lost control of my life,” Stiles mutters. “And I’d just gotten it under control, too.”

“Very dramatic,” Allison notes, taking a break from shoving food in her mouth to weigh in on the situation.

“Stiles, you passed your Trials a hundred times over on Korriban. You’re more than equipped to be a knight,” Morrell says, and Stiles sighs before picking his head back up and turning to look at her. Scott notices that Derek doesn’t move his hand.

“I don’t feel like knight material.”

“No one does,” Morrell says.

“I _still_ don’t,” Scott says, and Stiles looks over at him.

_What is my life?_

_Amazing, Stiles. Enjoy it._

Stiles smiles at that, and all he has to do at this point is to raise his right hand, fingers pointed up, his head quirked slightly forward, for Scott to know what he means.

The padawans get put in charge of clean up duty, but eventually everyone wanders off, most to go sleep in housing in the outpost buildings, leaving Scott and Allison in the quiet, dark mess. Allison is leaning against his side, a book propped op on her knees (Scott has noticed that she likes to read actual, physical paper books), and Scott is working on his report on his tablet. The silence is perfect, calm waves, and Scott squeezes Allison’s hand where she’s linked their fingers over one of her shoulders.

“I have a new word for you,” Allison says quietly, turning her head slightly so that he can look at her. “Volgoth.”

“Volgoth,” Scott tries it out, and it sounds a bit rougher than the other words he’s heard. “What’s it mean?”

Allison turns her body so that she can press a palm to Scott’s thigh, run her fingers over the seam in his pants, and he looks down at her fingers before looking back up at her, swallowing hard.  

“To want,” Allison says, and the kiss she presses to his lips is searing and perfect.

\---

Stiles is aware of Derek moving towards him from the moment he sneaks into Stiles’ range, coming from somewhere past the admin buildings. He doesn’t go to meet him, though; he lets him trail through the grass towards where Stiles is laid out on his back on one of the wings of Danny’s fighter, staring star-ward.

Stiles loves the differences between constellations on different planets. Some have more stars and suns in view, some have less, and every one has a slight shift, something that’s visible in the middle of night in the spring on Corellia might only be visible in the fall, early morning, from Taanab.

Derek stops below him, and Stiles abandons the stars for a moment to roll over onto his side, stare down at Derek. He’s wearing nothing but his undershirt and a pair of loose pants, barefoot in the grass, although Stiles can see that he’s in a partial shift, ears pointed, eyes red, and feet rough. Stiles lets his eyes follow the strip of fur from his shoulder down to his elbow, and then past smooth skin to claws that Derek curls inward, into his palms, when he feels Stiles looking.

“Couldn’t sleep?” Stiles asks, and Derek just jumps up onto the wing in answer, the claws on his feet making clipped noises on the metal. By the time he sits down next to Stiles he’s back to looking fully human, although the red takes a while to fade from his eyes.

“I could ask you the same thing,” Derek says finally.

“I got used to not sleeping much on Korriban,” Stiles says. “Haven’t been able to shake the habit yet. What about you?”

“I went for a run,” Derek says, voice gruff, and something in his tone suggests that he was running on four legs, not two.

Stiles hums in response, his eyes back on the stars. He can see Drall’s Hat directly above him, and the alpha star in Ronto near the horizon, but the rest of the constellations he remembers from Corellia are missing. It would be easier to find the ones he knows you’d be able to see from Coruscant if the light pollution wasn’t so bad. He’s spent long nights in the map room with the star chart from the sky above him projected in the room.

“I want to apologize,” Derek says after a while, and Stiles turns his head to look at him.

“For what?” Stiles honestly can’t think of anything that Derek would need to apologize for.

“I didn’t mean to upset you with the… with Laura.”

“Ah,” Stiles says, remembering his breakfast conversation with Lydia. It had faded to the background in the wake of everything with Taanab and Harris. “It’s not a big problem. I know you guys keep mementos after someone dies.”

“I know that you know, but it was still selfish and unnecessary. Laura was a Jedi before she was anything else.”

“I’m pretty sure you’re the one who told me that home matters.”

“That’s a self-interested desire of mine, to cling to Qiiura.”

“Well then we’re all self-interested, at the end of everything.”

“Maybe,” Derek sighs, and they lapse into silence for a while, although Derek does scoot closer to him, over the cool metal, so that their shoulders and knees are touching.

Stiles isn’t exactly sure when he decides to stop stargazing, but he takes in a deep breath and then rolls over, so that he’s bracketing Derek’s body with his arms and legs, staring down at his face. Derek has a brief moment of surprise, but then he reaches out, almost automatically, tugs at Stiles with his hands and the force, pulling him down. For that all they’ve been doing the kiss is quiet and soft, something almost tentative.

“You smell like aconitum,” Derek says roughly when he pulls away, buries his face in Stiles’ neck instead, breaths in deep. Stiles doesn’t prompt him, knows he’ll explain on his own. “A flower from home.”

Stiles is suddenly surrounded by a memory of a soft wind, the smell of small purple flowers tangled in the air, someone’s hand on his forehead.

“I think that’s Laura’s doing,” Stiles murmurs, pulls back so that he can kiss along Derek’s jaw, pull at his earlobe with his teeth, and it makes Derek stutter out a little gasp.

“Protection,” Derek says, and Stiles nods against Derek’s skin, his face pressed to one side of Derek’s head and a hand against the other side, thumb rubbing against Derek’s jaw.

“Se bordrand,” Stiles says, at the same time he thinks _a shield_. Derek nods, and then turns so that he can kiss Stiles again, and they end up in a tangle of limbs, Stiles’ hands in Derek’s hair, lips on lips and skin on skin.

 _But you can always walk new paths._ Fire returning to the ground, twisted metal to the sky, and Stiles has one scarred and one whole palm on Derek’s skin, and a perfect storm in his mind that reminds him of dancing in the rain as a child.

When he smiles against Derek’s lips, Derek returns the expression, and arches up into Stiles, two bodies in one space. 


End file.
